The band David Bowie believed made music for the future
It’s impossible to gauge how long some artists will last in the mainstream. Some may stick around to make a couple of good tunes, but it’s anyone’s guess whether they will have the same staying power past the dreaded sophomore slump.
Although David Bowie took pride in being able to bend music to his will whenever he went into the studio, others often had that same superpower.
Then again, Bowie’s abilities were all about him trying to make something new that no one had ever heard. He had his moments where he would play a version of musical dress-up by going in different directions on Young Americans, but when working with people like Brian Eno, it was always about taking the music that they had absorbed over the years and playing the notes that no one had quite reached yet.
That’s half the reason why the ‘Berlin trilogy’ works so well. Bowie was looking to create new worlds that no one had discovered, and on albums like Low, he took the makings of everything from kraut rock to electronic music and ended up creating the basis for what post-rock would become. But by the 1980s, rock and roll had gone past the point of traditional rock or even punk.
The likes of Joy Division had started the post-punk movement in earnest, but U2 were a unique breed of band. The Irish icons had taken their stance to the top of the world in the 1980s with The Joshua Tree, but by working alongside Eno for their projects, they kept wanting to evolve once they hit albums like Achtung Baby and Zooropa.
And while Bowie was on his sonic adventure embracing digitised sounds on Earthling, he could appreciate the fact that U2 were taking chances and making music that would last for decades to come, saying, “They might be all shamrocks and deutsche marks to some, but I feel that they are one of the few rock bands even attempting to hint at a world which will continue past the next great wall – the year 2000.”
But that was going on well before even working on albums like Zooropa. The shimmering guitars at the top of ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’ feel like being transported through time in many respects, and when The Edge hit on Achtung Baby, the tones that he was getting out of his guitar on songs like ‘Mysterious Ways’ sounded like his guitar was made out of heavy machinery.
Even for as self-righteous as Bono could seem during this period, though, his way of carrying on Bowie’s sense of theatrics was commendable to some degree. ‘The Fly’ was an interesting diversion for a while, but seeing him become the real-life incarnation of the Devil when he got up onstage and making bold claims about the state of the world never felt preachy. It felt like art, and that was what Bowie admired before anything else.
Was it going to be as inventive as the kind of stuff that made Bowie love rock and roll like The Velvet Underground? Probably not, but he could appreciate that U2 gave that feeling to people who grew up listening to CDs rather than vinyl. Pop stars did get their time in the sun, but it was far more interesting to listen to people who toyed with the idea of what a famous musician could be.
